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Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

In 1946 Geoffrey Tillotson described Bleak House as “the finest literary work the nineteenth century produced in England.”  While Tillotson’s claim may be debateable, according to Harry Blamires in 1987, “there is now something close to critical agreement that Bleak House is Dickens’s most complex and memorable single achievement.”  What the critical assessment of the novel is in the twenty-first century is ours to discover as we work our way through what is certainly one of, if not the longest of Dickens’s novels, a work that famously immortalized the infamously impenetrable and seemingly unresolvable legal case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, raised the spectre of spontaneous human combustion in the popular imagination of the nineteenth century, inaugurated the genre of the detective novel, and introduced readers to a tremendous cast of colourful characters who are variously mad, macabre, morose, and magnificent.  We will begin our study of Dickens’s work by considering short selections from Sketches by Boz that demonstrate on a small scale the empathy and keen observation of the people and architecture (social and physical) of Victorian England that Dickens brought on a much grander scale to Bleak House.  Our study will then take us step by step through the nineteen monthly parts of the original serial publication of the novel in 1852-53.  Our journey through Dickens’s often dark and deplorably dingy London and his irrepressibly sympathetic exploration of human fallibility will provide opportunity to develop close reading, research, and critical interpretation skills.